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Welcome to this edition of Modern Sales Point of View. Today we hear from the terrific Tito Bohrt, Founder & CEO of AltiSales. Tito discusses what’s changing in B2B sales, what sales tactics are working, and why being targeted in your outreach will get you better results than trying to play the volume game.

What’s changing in B2B Sales?

In Tito’s mind, sales development today is much more difficult than it was five or ten years ago. “Everybody’s getting blasted with hundreds of emails every day,” says Tito. “It’s pretty hard to break through that noise and get a prospect’s attention.”

What’s not working in B2B Sales?

“What’s not working is playing the volume game rather than the quality game,” says Tito. If he can tell he’s just being spammed without any care put into the outreach, he automatically deletes those messages—and he knows he’s not the only one. Instead of trying to hit higher and higher numbers in terms of email sends and cold calls, Tito recommends salespeople focus on quality and personalization. By showing the prospect that you’ve done your research, you demonstrate that you understand their business and can help them improve. “Be very targeted,” says Tito, “show me why: why me and why now.”

What’s working in B2B Sales?

Tito’s answer is simple: providing value. Though it may seem obvious, it’s incredibly effective. People appreciate that you’ve put in the effort to understand their company and challenges. “If you can show within the first two or three minutes that you understand what they do and how you would amplify or improve that with your offering,” says Tito, you’re going to be successful.

Let’s play sales word association!

As a little bonus, we played word association with Tito using sales buzzwords. Stay tuned to see if you can relate!

Between shooting selfie videos for LinkedIn, crafting Instagram stories, and replying to Tweets, it’s easy to get overwhelmed building a social media presence. Whether it’s for my own personal accounts or brands I’ve managed, I rely on four principles to guide my social media decision making:

Quality

Consistency

Access

Vulnerability

These four concepts are meant to be simple. You can use them as a guiding light when you need to take a step back from your publishing strategy. They’re also applicable whether you’re posting to Twitter, LinkedIn or Snapchat. And for the most part, like a good personalized video, they’re meant to humanize your presence.

In this post, we’ll look at examples and lessons from a wide variety of accounts including, National Geographic, Tom Hanks, HubSpot and The Rock. So whether you’re an aspiring thought leader, celebrity, or B2B brand, there’s something here for you. Let’s dig in.

Quality: Cater to Your Audience

You need to know your audience and cater to their needs and appetite. Quality isn’t objective. Don’t have an audience yet? Figure out who you want to target and create for that audience. It’s a bit of an ‘if you build it they will come’ scenario.

In a world of mass scheduled content, a social feed that is low in quality is usually lacking thoughtfulness. And like real-world relationships, it’s much easier to connect when you’re being thoughtful.

Consistency: Regularity Over Volume

When I talk about posting consistency, most people’s minds immediately jump to publishing volume. What’s the magic number of Tweets? How often is too often?

It all depends on how much content you can create or curate.

Let’s consider two very different examples: social media management platform, Hootsuite, and America’s sweetheart, Tom Hanks.

Hootsuite consistently tweets 20+ times per day. That’s a lot of Tweets! But, that volume is matched by the amount of content they produce. Drawing from a large list of blog contributors that include in-house writers, freelancers and partners, Hootsuite can afford to post that often and doesn’t depend on endlessly reposting the same content.

Comparatively, Tom Hanks posts infrequently with one photo gracing his Instagram every couple of weeks. He doesn’t need to be posting often and if anything scarcity makes his posts that much more special.

Tom Hanks on the set of Henry IV via @tomhanks on Instagram.

What’s important to note is that both of these accounts are consistent in their publishing. You won’t see either account disappear for weeks or suddenly post 100 times in a day. It’s not about total volume. The focus should be on regularity. A good-quality post will pique a viewer’s interest but seeing an account’s consistent history of sharing good content will earn a follow.

Access: Why Should I Follow You?

What makes you or your brand unique? Every person or brand has a unique perspective and place in the world. Use that to shape your social media storytelling.

As an online video platform for business, Vidyard has access to world-class video marketers and sales professionals. And that’s exactly what you’ll find on our Twitter and LinkedInfeeds, content authored by experts relevant to our industry.

More than 89 million people follow National Geographic on Instagram because they capture parts of the world that are completely inaccessible to the average person. Their Instagram bio describes their account perfectly, “Experience the world through the eyes of National Geographic photographers.”

Find something to be obsessed with, and then obsess over it. Don’t compete; find what’s uniquely yours. Take your experience of life and connect that with your knowledge of photographic history. Mix it all together, and create an artistic world that we can enter into. If you only like shooting cell phone photos, then do that. If your dad works at a construction site that looks cool, use it. If your mom breeds poodles, then put them in your photographs. Use the camera to take what you know that others don’t, what you can access that others can’t, and the people or things you connect with, to construct your own world.

Vulnerability: There’s a Human Behind That Brand

While a polished social media profile has its benefits (I’m looking at you travel bloggers), you shouldn’t feel the pressure to present a picture-perfect presence every time. In fact, showing vulnerability can establish trust and humanize accounts. In the same way recording a Vidyard GoVideo makes you more vulnerable than a cold email, social media provides opportunities to share your or your brand’s vulnerable side.

It reminds us that behind that Tweet or Instagram photo, there’s a real, live human being. This empathy and understanding can be valuable when it comes to dealing with support issues, PR crises, or customer experience issues. I’m not saying you need to write about your relationship with your parents in your next LinkedIn post but there is value in sharing your opinion or something near and dear to you.

We can find a great example of this in Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Part of what makes Johnson’s social presence interesting is his access. He can take you with him on the red carpet and behind the scenes of his latest action flick. But arguably his most engaging and most popular posts are his video posts where he speaks off-the-cuff directly into his phone. Here he shares what how his failures inevitably have led to his successes:

But how do you do this as a brand? Be fearless in how you present your company. The primary objectives of Vidyard’s Instagram account is to showcase Vidyard’s culture and help with recruitment. We want to provide an honest, balanced view into all the wonderful, weird and sometimes wacky things that make up life at Vidyard. If you want a Vidyardian’s perspective, check out our company hashtag #VidyardLife.

So the next time you’re wondering, should I post this? Consider your account’s unique quality, consistency, access, and vulnerabilities. Happy social media-ing!

Fresh from the Vidyard Blog

To help build more personal connections with her accounts, a top Account Executive at MediaValet recently introduced video as part of her selling process. She’s had great success so far including helping to close a large deal for MediaValet. Read More

All too often salespeople bombard their prospects with impersonal and irrelevant messages. So how do you avoid the pitfalls of sales fails and create outreach that wins? Vidyard’s Shikha Bindra sat down with Terminus’ Morgan Gillespie and J.Barrow’s Morgan Ingram to discuss. Read More

Need to resize a video for IGTV? Add subtitles for Twitter? Throw in sound effects for YouTube? Or collage it with other clips for the Instagram feed? Kapwing lets you do all that and more for free from a mobile browser or website.

Tim himself is something of a living testimonial for testimonials–his team has filmed hundreds of videos for companies like Marketo, Amazon, and Equifax, and he has some ideas for making your testimonials even more potent.

What’s in a video testimonial?

Testimonials are simple on the surface–a customer appears on camera to champion your product and share their story. Eighty-nine percent of marketers consider them the single most effective tactic and they’re the cornerstone of most marketing strategies.

But the most effective testimonials always involve a non-trivial amount of planning and production.

“You can have the world’s best soundbite delivered by the world’s smartest CEO and it’s useless if the mic pops or the recording is too quiet,” warns Tim. Unlike sales videos or fireside chats, production quality matters. Testimonials need to be visually appealing, concise, and even-paced.

Before you begin filming, ask yourself three questions:

Who should you interview?

The person you place in the interview seat should help you accomplish your mission. That is, they should be able to quickly convey the value of your product or service in a way that guides your prospects down the funnel.

They should be:

Credible: Select someone who your audience will identify with. Often, that means an individual whose title suggests power and influence, such as the head of a department or an executive. But it could also mean a teacher or purchasing manager, depending on who you sell to.

Believable: Select a customer that’s had some quantifiable successes so they can come prepared with statistics and empirical evidence that your product works.

Capable: The person you interview must have the internal clout to help get the testimonial approved internally. There’s nothing worse than crafting an entire video only to have it shot down by the customer’s legal or PR department.

When and where should you film your customer story?

Broadly, there are two places you can film testimonials. Each has own pros and cons:

At your events: If you film at summits and conferences, you have a captive audience and can capture up to dozens of testimonials. But there are downsides. You’ll need to pull dedicated staff away from your event to manage the filming, and your testimonials may lack depth. You’ll never get as much time as you’d like with each customer, nor interview multiple people at each firm.

At the customer’s offices: If you send your video production crew to the client’s offices, you get to tell a deeper story. You’ll talk at length with multiple stakeholders who may talk more openly because they’re feeling less pressure to perform. Some marketers report that filming onsite is a useful marketing touchpoint and helps them deepen client relationships. The downside, however, is the time investment–you’ll likely only capture one testimonial in an entire day’s worth of filming.

Is it better to film at events or offices? It depends on whether you’re more concerned about quality or quantity. But if you have the luxury, do both and test.

How can you prepare for production?

A single outstanding sound bite can sometimes take tens of hours of interviewing, footage, and edits to produce. The more you plan and prep, the greater chance you’ll give your team of asking the right questions, eliciting the right responses, and getting to that sound bite faster.

First and foremost, find a strong interviewer who can guide your interviewee to the right conclusions, but who also deeply understands your product. They’ll need to:

Put the subject at ease

Keep the conversation flowing

Ask product related questions

Tie the dialogue back to the larger narrative

Get your logistics questions resolved well ahead of time. Identify all the people and equipment you’ll need, and don’t skimp on what might seem like trivialities. Hair, makeup, and professional lighting help make prospects look good – literally – and can help ensure they don’t resist approving the video because their face looks shiny.

Deploy multiple cameras to capture multiple angles. This gives your video editors more material and gives you plenty of backup equipment in case things break. And of course, great talent is a must – an experienced producer, director, and post-production team can help you create great videos faster.

Once you have the footage, don’t rush the post-production: “Boil it down, cut it, boil it down, and cut it,” says Tim. Take your time and “distill the video to its most essential parts.” That means not skipping the sound bite edit, where the video editor clarifies the timeline, or the creative edit, where the editor adds B-roll, product shots, and overlay graphics to make the whole thing flow.

Showing off your customers

Video testimonials are the cornerstone of most marketing strategies. With extra know-how and planning, you can make yours unusually effective.

Simply slow down to ask yourself the right questions before you begin filming: Who should we film? Where should it be? And, what do we need?

Answer those, and you’re well on your way to persuasive snapshots of your product’s greatest success: your happy, gushing customers.

Each year we do an analysis of all the data in our system, over 600 different companies, to create video benchmarks that help us understand what they’re doing with B2B video. We look at how many videos they are publishing on a monthly basis, what sort of trends we are seeing in different industries, how long the videos they publish are, how long people are actually watching.

Through all of this data, we find some interesting tidbits of knowledge and we share them with you, the rest of the world, in our Video Benchmark Report. To help you understand what different people are doing with video, and to understand what benchmarks you can be looking at as you plan out your own video strategies.

We recently hosted an interactive, entertaining, and educational discussion focused entirely on the findings of our 2018 Video in Business Benchmark Report. We were lucky enough to be joined by Rene Lego, Director of Video at SolarWinds and Daniel Sendecki, the Director of Brand & Creative at Uberflip.

Together with Tyler Lessard, VP of Marketing at Vidyard the discussion covered all the benchmarks you need to know about, and how to put key insights from the data into practice within your organization to drive your marketing, sales, and overall video strategy forward in the years to come.

Check it out in the video below;

Don’t have time to watch the full discussion? No worries here are a few of our favorite moments:

Are you seeing things accelerate in terms of how much video you’re using, and if so, where’s this growth coming from, what types of B2B video are you putting out there?

“We’re seeing a lot of increased production on our end across a wide spectrum of things. The real driver is that we’ve started to really shift our focus to more of an ABM approach. Which has the interesting causal effect of us creating more videos and more personalized videos that are more targeted to the accounts that we identify.” – Daniel Sendecki, the Director of Brand & Creative at Uberflip

“At SolarWinds, I know there’s a big demand for video, so it just never stops. At any given time we have probably 50 to 60 video requests in our queue. The biggest uptick for us has come in social, and customizing video for social. So we will make a video specific to Facebook, and then we’ll make a separate video specific to Instagram or we’ll make a video only for Instagram, and then we’ll make a video and only release it on LinkedIn, and make something specific for Twitter, so that’s definitely a trend that’s different for us than had been in previous years.” – Rene Lego, Director of Video at SolarWinds

What’s the best approach for B2B video creation? Outsourcing vs internal, and what’s the trade-off that companies tend to look at there?

“Well, for us it’s important to remain agile, so what we focused on is developing relationships with a couple of key agencies that can help us move the dial when it comes to larger production needs. But we’re also improving our in-house capabilities as well so that we can be self-service. So ensuring that we have the right hardware and software to be able to empower the rest of the company to join us in video creation!” – Daniel Sendecki, the Director of Brand & Creative at Uberflip

“Depending on whether it’s a featurette or a product release we create it. It really works from an in-house standpoint. Whenever we have gone out externally it’s become a little dicey, we’ve had to micromanage that external production house, or freelance team because they didn’t understand our product, or us. So for us in-house works, for others, a mixture.” – Rene Lego, Director of Video at SolarWinds

Where is the B2B video demand coming from and how are you using video across your different programs?

“I would say email, e-learning, specific QA nurture program, whether that nurture program is a combo of email and landing page, or sales and support those would be the biggest. And then second would be any new landing pages that are driving our SEO specifically.” – Rene Lego, Director of Video at SolarWinds

So it’s clear that the debate about whether or not to use video is dead–90% of marketers already do. Instead, companies are asking themselves, “How can we use it better?”

“The hardest part of the sales process is getting to engagement,” says Trish Bertuzzi. All too often salespeople make the problem worse by bombarding their prospects with impersonal and irrelevant messages. So how do you avoid the pitfalls of sales fails and create outreach that wins? Vidyard’s Shikha Bindra sat down with Terminus’ Morgan Gillespie and J.Barrow’s Morgan Ingram to discuss.

Use video to turn outbound fails into #wins

Think about how many emails you get on a daily basis. How many of them do you actually read?

Your prospects are in the same boat—a boat tossed in the waves of a sea of information that is, for the most part, useless to them. Are there a few pearls in there? Probably. But it’s nearly impossible to pick them out of a seemingly endless ocean of banality.

Imagine instead you got an email with a subject line saying someone had recorded a video just for you. I don’t know about you, but I would be intrigued!

Both Morgans have found that using video has allowed them to stand out in their prospects’ inboxes. People are much more inclined to watch a video than read yet another prospecting email—and since they’ve crafted unique messages to each person’s role and pain points, prospects are that much more likely to engage with what they have to say. By the time they make that first phone call, the conversation is already warm.

Tips & Best Practices

This all sounds very good in theory—but how do you actually go about creating a video prospecting message?

“A video is a virtual voicemail—don’t overcomplicate the process,” says Morgan Ingram. He and Morgan Gillespie recommend keeping prospecting videos short and to the point, or as Morgan G. likes to say, “be brief, be brilliant, and be gone!”

One structure they’ve found useful for their own videos is as follows:

Hook (15 seconds)

Get your prospect’s attention—you can talk about their role and the challenges they might be facing or use something you’ve found on their LinkedIn or social media profiles to make a personal connection (ie. their alma mater, a favorite hobby, etc.).

Value prop/pitch (30 seconds)

Give a brief, personalized pitch of your product/solution, making sure to touch on how your solution will solve a challenge facing their industry or create a new opportunity for their company. Keep it brief and leave them curious to find out more.

Call to Action (CTA) (15 seconds)

Direct your prospect to an ideal next step—that could be reading a blog post, booking a meeting, or something else entirely. Whatever it is, you’ve managed to break through the noise and capture their attention, so make you don’t let this opportunity go to waste!

Most importantly, don’t forget to smile! If you seem friendly and engaged, your prospects are all that more likely to be interested in what you have to say.

Getting started

Still not sure how to start? “Make a video,” says Morgan Ingram. “It’s the same advice I give for: ‘how do I get better at making cold calls?’ ‘Make cold calls.’”

He and Morgan Gillespie recommend taking the value prop you’re already getting wins from in your email or cold call outreach and repurposing it in your video. From there, it’s just growing your confidence on camera and practicing the structure we discussed above.

Already using video to get #saleswins? Looking forward to it? Let us know in the comments below!

Brands today are creating some truly awe-inspiring video content. It’s a full-fledged film renaissance and at Vidyard, we get to watch the Michaelangelos of sales and marketing paint their motion picture masterpieces with selfies, explainers, and screen captures.

But what about your team? Ever find yourself wondering what to put in your video, or curious what else is out there? Well, wonder no longer. We just launched a new site where you can fill up on all the inspiration you need, and then some: The Vidyard Video Inspiration Hub.

Get inspired with the Video Inspiration Hub

The Vidyard Video Inspiration Hub is a place to go to get inspired and to inspire others. It’s a nexus for video innovation–a digital water cooler where the B2B world can gather to celebrate and ogle the newest video masterpieces.